Empire in Black and Gold

‘Nobody else was going to take it!’ Stenwold got as far as reaching for the man’s arming jacket to shake him, but stopped himself fast before he made the mistake.

‘She’s an abomination.’ Tisamon sounded stunned. ‘She’s a halfbreed. A shame upon my race and family.’ His mouth formed the words very slowly. ‘My daughter?’

‘Yes, your daughter. And now you have to decide if you’re going to do now what you would have done then, or if you can — just possibly can — widen your mind enough to accept that she exists. And I warn you, if you act against her, not only will you not find it so bloody easy, but you’ll also have me to deal with, probably Totho too.’ He saw a harsh look come over the other man’s face and interpreted it as best he could. ‘Oh, I know, you wouldn’t break into a sweat over it, but don’t think that would-’

‘I would not. . harm you.’ Tisamon sounded and looked a hundred years older in that moment, ashen and fragile as no Mantis that Stenwold had ever encountered had looked before.

‘And?’

‘I will not harm her.’ Something was building in Tisamon, and Stenwold saw that it was not even the shock of having a daughter that was crippling him. Atryssa. It was that Atryssa was dead, had died without him, had died with him believing her a traitor. It was an unwelcome conclusion that Stenwold should have come to a long time before, but he saw now that Tisamon had stayed in Helleron because he had never wanted to see Atryssa again — because he did not want to be the one to end her life. For a Mantis, he supposed, that was love. Stenwold stepped back, suddenly fearful that he had gone too far.

‘I need to think.’ Tisamon turned away, hiding his face.

‘I’m sorry. I should have. . I should have told you before. Sooner.’

‘You are right in all you said,’ Tisamon stated. ‘I would not have understood, and it remains to be seen if I ever shall. I will. . I will rejoin you at dawn, I hope. I need time and space to. . I need to be alone.’

He made a slow progress away from that place, heading into the hills. Stenwold stood and watched him until darkness and the land put him out of sight.

He did not notice Tynisa’s expression, as he returned to camp. He was too concerned with his own woes.

It had been a sour day’s journeying. Stenwold sat hunched at the controls of the limping, lurching automaton wrapped in a dusty silence that nothing had relieved. Achaeos and Totho’s silent enmity seemed to somehow be growing in the vacuum of their mutual ignoring. At first Stenwold had thought it was because Totho was a half- breed. After the lad went to tinker with something in the back, making Achaeos’s disdain only increase, he realized it was because Totho was an artificer. This was a clash of world-views.

Tynisa, however, Achaeos seemed to regard with a wary respect. That reaction had sprung up after she had drawn on Tisamon. No, Tynisa’s problem was with Stenwold himself, for she had not said a word to him all day. She had glared at him if he even chanced to look her way. He supposed that she was still waiting for an explanation of Tisamon’s reaction to her, but he was wretchedly unable to give it. Tisamon himself had not returned. Until he spoke to Tisamon again, until Tisamon had sorted out precisely how he felt, Stenwold could not bring himself to explain to her. It just was another betrayal. He owed her more than he owed to the Mantis, and yet he could not wrench himself free of those bonds formed two decades ago.

The entire sorry business had gone from bad to worse, and he now was in danger of losing everything by it. He thought back to that moment of choice, by Atryssa’s deathbed, and wondered what he could have done differently that might have made this moment bearable.

He pictured coming to Tisamon with an infant and a story — or even a child of, say, six or ten. He pictured the wrathful reaction of the man. In seventeen years, time had dulled it a little, built over it like a coral, so that the shape of it remained but not the edges. Even so it had been a close-run thing between Tisamon’s self-control and his blade’s temper. No, if Stenwold had tried this trick ten years earlier, Tisamon would certainly have killed him, and killed the child.

Would he? Was Tisamon a man to kill an infant, his own daughter still in swaddling? Is that what I really believe of my old friend?

With a heavy heart Stenwold acknowledged that, yes, Tisamon was the man to do it. It would have been done in rage, and perhaps he would have later mourned the loss, but his pride would have spurred him to it, even so.

At least Stenwold had been able to encourage himself by the fact that they were gaining on their quarry, even though he had no real plan for tackling the reinforced Wasps when he found them. Before dusk, though, the ground ahead changed, and it did not take a tracker to tell him that the slavers had new transportation. The land before them was scuffed and scarred with a great reticulated trail. Some large tracked vehicle, or more than one of them, was now shipping the slaves eastwards. Stenwold feared that, whatever this conveyance was, it would travel faster than their own jolting relic.

That night he faced the prospect of a joyless camp. He turned to Totho instead, as the only one of his companions he still felt comfortable talking to.

‘We need to go faster,’ he said.

Totho cast a sidelong glance at their automotive. ‘It’s not going to be easy, sir,’ he said, ‘and it might not survive it. I needed to tighten every joint as it is.’

‘I’ll help you,’ Stenwold suggested. ‘If the two of us work through the night, we might be able to wring a bit of extra speed out of this contraption. And you don’t need to keep calling me sir. We’re not at the College now.’

Totho shrugged. ‘Well, s- Well, Master Maker-’

‘Totho?’

‘Well.’ Totho cut the honorific by dint of extreme effort. ‘I’m game if you are.’

It had been a good idea of his, Stenwold allowed, but he had not anticipated the problems with its execution. The chief problem was that Stenwold had been teaching history and busying himself with politics for the last decade, and Totho was fresh from the College and sharp with it. It was a short while before Stenwold realized that he simply did not understand some of the more technical points the boy was making. After that, he became reluctantly convinced that he himself was just getting in the way. Still a stubborn pride that would have befitted Tisamon kept him sweating and slaving away by the sputtering gas lamp that Totho had rigged up, until eventually the youth said, ‘If we both work. . if we both work all night, sir, then neither of us will be in any shape to. . to drive it in the morning.’ This awkward display of tact was shaming. Stenwold had never ceased to think of himself as an artificer, despite his lack of practice, but it seemed the rest of the world had stopped considering him one a long time ago.

When I get back to Collegium, I will have to brush up, he vowed. He slid himself out from under the automotive, confessing openly that this was a good idea, and in that case why didn’t he get some sleep now. He felt old and wretched.

When he approached the fire he found Achaeos was asleep, but Tynisa was not. Whether she was keeping watch or just waiting for him he could not say, but her hard stare fixed him as he approached the circle of firelight. Her gaze was filled with a slow-burning anger that, he reflected sadly, she must have inherited from her father. Faced with that, he paused at the edge of the camp, knowing that it was his duty, as her guardian, as a human being, to say something, to explain.

He could not. Wordlessly he turned away, and built up a meagre fire on the other side of the automotive. That was where Tisamon eventually found him.

He heard the tread before he saw the man, and then the lean, tall figure was striding out of the night to sit, silently, across the small fire from him. The guttering light chased shadows across the Mantis’s angular face. For a long time neither man trusted himself to speak.

‘We are neither of us the things we would have wanted to be when this day came,’ Tisamon said softly at last, without looking at him. ‘Look at us. What are we? You have become the meddling intelligencer, sending the young to their deaths. I am a sell-sword who has not cared, these last years, whose blood was on my blade. You said to Monger that I fought for honour, but until you called for me that had not been true for a long time.’ A heavy pause. ‘We did not think, when we were young, that we would end up here.’

‘We did not,’ replied Stenwold, heartfelt.

‘I. .’ Tisamon stopped, stirred the fire with a stick. His lips moved, but for a long time there was nothing. Stenwold gave him his time. It was not as though he himself had anything to say.